History of Bibliographies

As I have been working to figure out what to do for this project I honestly was confused for a time because everything I tried to search for to find some decent books on this subject were not really coming up. I finally found something about the history of bibliographies (which finding a subject that didn't already have the book checked out that I was looking at online was what became my hardest challenge). Funny thing as I was looking at bibliographies for some reason my brain kept thinking that I was trying to tell it that biographies and bibliographies are the same thing. Biographies- descriptions of people in history. Bibliographies- things used to cite documents and sources.


E. W. Padwick, Bibliographical Method, James Clarke and Co. Ltd., 1969
[I found this book when I was looking at the section Z 1001 where books on bibliographies are located.]
The Bibliographical Method discusses how some of the first printed biographies came about. They were not widely printed until Conrad Gesner, in 1545, Published Bibliotheca universalis.  A book which had over 1,264 folio pages with numerous author writings published in this book, including a bibliography of every author.
(link to where to find Bibliographical Method  HBLL website)

George Schneider(Translated by Ralph Robert Shaw), Theory and History of Bibliography, New York Columbia University Press, 1934
[This Book was also found as I scoured section Z 1001 looking for books that had titles that had to do with the history of Bibliographies]
The Theory and History of Bibliography talks about how bibliography's came to be the type of book that they are. Originally they were defined as the mechanical writing and transcription of books. Ebert is quoted as having said that bibliographies are, "in the broadest sense, the science that deals with literary productions." Ebert was one of the greatest German bibliographers.
(link to Theory and History of Bibliography  HBLL website)

D. F. McKenzie, Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts, Cambridge University Press, 1999
[Bibliography and the Sociology of Text was also found in the Z 1001 section of the HBLL.]
Mr. G Thomas Tanselle one said, referring to bibliographies, "a related group of subject that happen to be commonly referred to by the same term." Theory and History of Bibliography divides bibliographies into a number of categories; enumerative or systematic bibliography, descriptive, analytical, textual, and historical bibliography.
(link to Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts HBLL website)

D. W. Krummel, Bibliographies Their Aims and Methods, Mansell Publishing Limited, 1984
[Bibliographies Their aims and Methods was found on a shelf again in the Z 1001 section.]
Bibliographies Their Aims and Methods points out that bibliographies are not as Sir Walter Greg said, "it is convenient to students of any subject to regard bibliographers as a race of useful drudges-servi a bibliotheca-who are there to do for them some of the spade-work they are too lazy or too incompetent to do for themselves." D. W. Krummel discusses that the earliest bibliographies may be lost in historical records and that bibliographies themselves coincided with the origins of research during the time of Aristotle.
(link to Bibliographies Their Aims and Method Villinova Website)

Robin Myers and Michael Harris, Pioneers in Bibliography, St. Paul's Bibliographies, 1988
[Pioneers in Bibliography was found in section Z1001]
Robin Myers and Michael Harris point out that bibliographers who pioneered catalogues of medieval for the most part nothing is know about them. Very few bibliographers do we even know there names unless they signed their library catelogue. These men point out that only through bibliographers writings are we able to learn to about why these men compiled the works that they did.
(link to Pioneers in Bibliography HBLL website)

Publishers: An Annotated Bibliography

I love libraries.  I had actually forgotten how much I loved libraries; so far in my college experience, I’ve sort of avoided the library, but making this bibliography (or at least starting it; I’ve found a few more references I want to track down later) has reminded me how much I enjoy the time I spend in the library.  Actually, though, it’s probably a good thing that I haven’t been into the library too often; I have to admit that a large portion of the time I spent there was actually getting sidetracked by other cool or interesting things.  I probably spent the same amount of time reading extraneous articles as I spent reading books germane to my topic.  Oh well, I enjoyed it, so I can’t really say it was a waste.  J

Spelling is Eazzee

I decided to do my annotated bibliography on the effect of print on orthography. If you don’t know what orthography means, it’s ok. I didn’t either. So, after another Google search I found that it means “The conventional spelling system of a language.” Basically, orthography is a fancy way of saying spelling.

As I sat and pondered how I would find the books I needed for the annotated bibliography, I literally went to Google and searched “how to find books in the library”. (Judge me if you wish, I judged myself) Surprisingly, I found a great site that explained the Dewey decimal system. Good thing I discovered from a trusty librarian that the BYU library uses the Library of Congress classification…

So, after another, yes another, Google search for “Library of Congress classification”, I found THIS!

I figured that I should understand how the organizational system of the library works in order for me to actually find the books I need. After I read through and got a semi-solid basis of understanding, I went the BYU library website. 

Printing the Word of Law

For my annotated bibliography post I decided to research how the advent of printing dramatically changed the nature of written law. Although law codes had been written in various forms for thousands of years, the transition to print as the medium for this very important knowledge would usher in a new era of uniformity, and challenge conventional authority, changing the way law is perceived in our society. Keep reading to find out more!

La Biblia en La Biblioteca

For the class field trip, I went to The Life and Legacy of the King James Bible, as my other group members Tanner and Montana have as well.

 I found myself rather amazed by the history of the Bible itself. From the original Latin Vulgate version to the final translation of the King James Bible, the history is full of drama, enough to probably create a long running series if one were made.

To Everyone Concerned (an update on my life)

So, maybe you've noticed I haven't done much blogging in the last week, or maybe you haven't.  I know it's been vacation, so we've all been taking a little break.

For those who didn't know, my fiancée Camille left me last week.  I haven't had much desire to do anything.  I apologize for falling behind, but I needed this week to myself to be with family and friends, and reflect, and try to move on.  I'll be getting back to business as usual next week, and I hope to be able to catch up for the posts and comments that I have missed.

Thank you all for being great to work with.  I really appreciate having such a good group in this class.  See you in a week.

Brett

Miles of Aisles

Today I found myself dancing down the library aisles rocking out to my iPod while searching for literature on the history of books. I spent a few hours wandering the shelves searching for the perfect resources. It was quite the adventure!

"A Bible! A Bible! We have got a Bible"

For my "field trip" for our class's print unit I decided to visit, "The Life and Legacy of the King James Bible" exhibit in the Harold B. Lee library here at BYU. It was truly an eye opening experience for me to see just how much time, effort, and even controversy went into creating what I thought was just the de facto Bible throughout history (that shows just how much I know). Keep reading after the break!

The Freschetta Stone

So, for our civilization project over in the Greece Group, we got together and discussed how we wanted to do our artifact and Rosetta thing.  Our first thought was that the Greeks, like many other ancient cultures in the Mediterranean area, frequently wrote on papyrus.  It seemed easy enough, it is a simple and common medium, but when we tried to get our hands on papyrus, we immediately started running into difficulties.  First, we tried online, but the fastest reliable shipment method we could find would have taken a full four days (by which time we needed to be translating our new artifact), so we searched to see if there were any local stores that might have it, to no avail.  We considered stone, which was a popular medium at certain Greek time periods, but discarded that idea because of the difficulty of writing into that medium.

Our Rosetta thing and our received artifact, displayed against
The Freschetta box we used to preserve the "Stone"

The Bible

When I visited the Life and Legacy of the King James Bible Exhibit I really thought it was interesting how bibles changed over time to fit the new medium and the changes in language. As was discussed in class originally the first bibles that were printed were made to look like the handwritten bibles of the past. 

The bible was translated from its original language into languages that for the most part the general population couldn't read. Later after King James the 1st comissioned the new translation of the bible(Madison Grant has a good blog about this specifically) and the translator did there best to make sure that there translations were accurate by going back to the Hebrew and Greek versions of the bible that they had to make the best translation possible. If we were to look at alot of the meaning of the words that the translators translated in the past we could find alot of things hard to understand because languages change over time. 

Some words today if I read from the King James version have a much different meaning than I would think was being refereed to. Such as, accursed which means devoted or amazement which means terror(More here). These word have a much different meaning and can really be confusing in today's world. 

How much do the differences in our language today affect the understanding of the Bible and in the future with languages changing how much will the changes affect the understanding further?

Write Like an Egyptian

For the Rosetta Stone project I was in the African cultures group. Fittingly enough for a project emulating the famous stone, we decided to write out our message in ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics... and because that's virtually the only written language of ancient Africa that has been translated into English, so we had no choice in the matter. Now, I'm not trying to make this project sound miserable, it really ended up being a lot of fun! It was really cool to see just what challenges played into the translation of ancient texts. Follow after the jump to find out for yourself!

Our Own Rosetta "Stone" sort of

What I got to help with for the making of our Rosetta Stone was the writing of the 2nd half of the project. Alicia emailed me the translation for the Greek wax that we got from the other group and the translation said, 

"Equo ne credite, Teucri! Quidquid id est, timeo Danaos et dona ferentis.

Do not trust the horse, Trojans! Whatever it is, I fear the Danaans,

even when bringing gifts.

不要相信馬，木馬！不管是什麼，我怕希臘人，甚至帶來的禮物時," 

This project turned out to be a much more challenging thing than I expected. I was worried that I wouldn't be able to fit all of the project on this one medium so I first had to write it on the project lightly. My first attempt was to large. The Greek was not going to fit on the medium with the English and the Chinese on my first try. So i shrunk down the Greek to take up a smaller space and this time it was the proper size which was awesome. It took me a few hours to pencil out all the symbols and then another two and a half hours to paint over the symbols that I had made. When I got to the Chinese, my friend Rebecca came over and helped me cause she looked at my Chinese symbols and let me know that what I was doing did not really have the flow of Chinese symbols. My writing didn't have the curves that Chinese character should. 

Also I was lucky enough to be doing my writing around my friend PJ and had him read over the Chinese that I had written. He said that my symbols were correct but I didn't have some of the symbols grouped together correctly. Lucky for me I was able to fix the problem with my writing and so now my looks good with only a mistake in one spot, an ink smear. Over all I learned that some mediums are better than other at helping to write different languages. Luckily we chose a medium that even though the message is somewhat long it was able to include all three languages very easily.

Mommy, Daddy, Help!

For our written medium, our little Asian cultures group decided to go with a Chinese artefact.
After much discussion we decided bamboo scroll would be the best option since it would fit into our time frame. I was in charge of writing down the phrase onto the bamboo.
Supplies were kindly contributed by other Alicia and Scott.
The only issue was I had no idea how to write it or even what to write.
That's when Moms and Pops came to the rescue!
It was quite interesting trying to write this using ancient mediums but doing so by watching my parents on Skype. I regret now that I did not print shot any of the Skype session.

The final result was:

 

 

credit to Kody Wood

We decided to go with phrases that were well-known and would typically be put on a scroll for gift purposes. Since typically these bamboo scrolls were used (and actually still are being used) for being given to friends and families.

So thanks Mom and Dad! Thanks for being Asian!

Banned

The world knows of China's censorship of media. They censor all types of mediums including television, print media, radio, film, theater, text messaging, instant messaging, video games, literature and the Internet. A wide variety of subject matter is censored by the government: politics, cultural, moral, religious, & economic. 

Anything that can essentially tarnish the government's reputation with topics ranging from independence of the people to corruption and anarchism is censored. Pornography and some religious texts, publications, and materials are also banned.

Index Librorum Prohibitorum (say that five times fast)

 Index Librorum Prohibitorum 

The first time we talked about the “index” in class, I was immediately interested, and I’ve been thinking about it and even reading about it since.  I think it’s a great way to transition from written cultures and knowledge directly into more print-based culture.

The opening pages of the document

Would You Like Some Cyanide with that?

So I know that Professor Burton wants us to start to transition our posts into our new unit on printing, but I had another idea I really wanted to post about. In class on Tuesday we brushed on the topic of how the development of writing systems granted access to the languages of other cultures by means of translation and an easier structure for teaching that language, which led to a larger dissemination of these languages. This greater understanding of other languages led to a very significant tactical change - the beginning of intelligence gathering and espionage between civilizations. This idea particularly piqued my interest because as a Middle Eastern Studies/Arabic major this is one of the career fields I'm interested in going into, (and I think it would be kinda cool to talk about ancient spies).

Moving Forward and Back

This is the Tsunami  by Hokusai which was printed is a very interesting way by the Japanese people. They used wood block printing to make this picture of a wave. What is wood block printing?

Palm Fronds

"Oh, and bring something to write on!" How many times have you heard that phrase? Did you ever think to bring something other than paper? Of course not! That's what paper is for! Not once did it even cross my mind to bring a clay tablet or an animal skin, but originally, that's what people wrote on! People used the resources that they had at hand. And for India, that meant palm fronds.

By some estimates, palm leaf books originated in India around fifteenth century BC. Tree leaves were used to record important documents like Buddhist scriptures, law, biographical information, and Sanskrit literature. 

Palm leaves are flattened, dried and smoothed in preparation to make a book. Letters are inscribed by using a needle-like instrument that cuts into the surface. The writing is not all that visible before it is covered over with soot or pigment mixed with oil. They can then be illustrated (some with intricate paintings) and strung together. Two holes are bored though the center of the leaves to bind the book together with a cord. ChinaView shows the process of creating a palm leaf book with a series of pictures. (I highly recommend it!)

Colombia University is trying to identify this text.

Unfortunately, these beautiful books decay rapidly. We have very few surviving copies of palm frond books and those that we have really aren't all that old. Some of them remain untranslated. Colombia University has requested help online to identify and translate an old text written on palm fronds. Even today it is hard to translate some of these old languages because they simply are no longer in use. We lament the loss of these wonderfully crafted texts. I suppose that palm book making has been abandoned because of their short shelf life and the difficulty of making them.

What does the future hold? With the advent of e-books, printed books have become increasingly less popular. Now you can carry around an entire library in your bag! I patiently wait for the day that museums will put my text books on display and everyone will marvel over the fact that we wrote on paper. The day is ever near that the phrase "Oh, and bring something to write on" will no longer refer to paper.

Dear Diary...

In keeping with the last few weeks, I have decided to again continue research into the history of book writing.  While I was researching, I had the idea that journal writing must have been an interesting topic in the past; with books and paper so hard to come by, I couldn't imagine that people would just go to the store and buy a blank notebook, so I started to do some digging.  This week's post is the results.

To Write or Not to Write

So for this post I'm going to deviate a little bit from the civilization I've been covering, but I think it's appropriate given what we've been talking about in class. (But the writing that I'm talking about was written in reformed Egyptian so its kinda almost related)

Today in class we touched briefly on the characteristics of the civilizations that some of us have been studying that did not have written languages. It's difficult to determine why they didn't develop such a system, but the effects of that lack of development are blatantly obvious. We know very little about those without a writing system, and their societies do no appear as advanced as their writing counterparts, (In most cases, barring the Incas who appear to be an exception to the rule). The Book of Mormon gives a perfect example of the different paths civilizations might take depending on their development  (or use) of a written language. Keep reading after the jump to find out more!

Japanese Literature

Ancient Japan did not have its own written language until the Kanji was introduced by the Chinese as I pointed out in a previous post. Since the Japanese originally took their language from the Chinese their first works of literature had alot of the Chinese writing style once they started writing about Japan.

Maps: Shrinking the World

With the advent of writing, the world suddenly got a lot smaller. People no longer depended on first-hand experience or word of mouth to know about far away places. People depended on maps.